Sunday, December 01, 2013

BBC fails to tell Jewish half of the story

On the anniversary of the passing of UN resolution 181 on the Partition of Palestine the BBC dutifully undertook a PR campaign on behalf of the Palestinian refugee agency UNWRA, featuring a slide show of the early years of Palestinian refugees. As the excellent BBC Watch explains, the BBC duly ignored a 21 November conference telling the 'untold' story of Jewish refugees, thus breaching its owns editorial guidelines on impartiality. Lack of suitable photographic material cannot be a valid excuse: Below Point of No Return has put together its own slide show.

Quite how the promotion of campaigning
material produced by politically motivated organisations can be
considered part of the BBC’s remit or in adherence to its editorial
guidelines on impartiality is a (big) question in itself, but it is
notable that the captions to the photographs showcased by the BBC adhere
diligently to the UNRWA script, with the text accompanying the final
photograph, for example, reading:

“There are
now four generations of Palestinian refugees. The “right of return” to
their former homes in what is now Israel remains one of the thorniest
issues in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”

But of course the issue of Palestinian
refugees is only half the story. The other half – that of Jewish
refugees from Arab lands – has no dedicated UN refugee agency to
document its history, no hereditary refugee status, no UN sponsored ‘Solidarity Day’ and no UN funded committee to champion its ‘inalienable rights’.

The other half of that story has in fact
never been mentioned in any UN resolution whatsoever in the past 66
years, as was pointed out by Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor,
at a special UN session held on November 21st.

“In his
statement, Prosor decried the United Nations’ actions. “Since 1947,
there have been 687 resolutions relating to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict,” he said. Over 100 of those resolutions “deal specifically
with the Palestinians refugees. And yet as we speak today, not one
resolution says a single word about the Jewish refugees.” ”

The special session was titled “The Untold Story of the Middle East: Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries,” and was hosted by the World Jewish Congress. The event featured testimonies from speakers including Lucette Lagnado, Linda Menuhinand Levana Zamir
and the film below was also screened. In conversation with BBC Watch,
Ambassador Prosor noted that only one Arab country was represented at
the event.

Above: Ezra Haddad, a young polio victim from Iraq, is helped to walk at at hospital in Israel (1950) Below: Egyptian Jews arrive at the Greek port of Piraeus in 1957 on their way to Israel(JDC archives)

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)